Meanwhile, an important, interesting, and well-crafted amicus brief on behalf of 97 tech companies, listed in Appendix A in the brief, below. I expect that Washington State will tackle the government’s interpretation of precedent and federal statutes in some detail. The job of an amicus brief is slightly different. A amicus writes as a “friend of the court”, stating its interest in the case and offering legal support specifically in favor of its interest. A good amicus brief is selective, surgically intervening in the swirl of arguments and counterarguments made by the main parties to the suit raise.

As I have tried to illustrate with the annotations below, this is precisely what the tech companies’ amicus brief has accomplished. The companies’ brief pinpoints the economic threats to and disruptions of American business caused by the executive order, specifically in virtue of the ways in which it is illegal and unconstitutional. The brief argues that an unreasonable, arbitrarily enforceable, potentially open-ended executive order violates both Congressional statutes and Constitutional provisions requiring that immigration be handled in accordance with Due Process, Equal Protection, general reasonableness standards, and non-discrimination on the basis of national origin. To highlight how the technology amicus brief does this I have annotated the copy below. The actual brief begins at page 7 of 53; the earlier material states the argument for the court to accept the brief.